By Kwon Mee-yoo
The time difference between Broadway and Seoul is shrinking — John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play “Red” is now in Korea at the Lee Hae-rang Arts Theatre in Dongguk University, Seoul.
Upon entering the theater, the audience may feel like they are entering an artist’s studio. Big canvases and buckets are scattered and the smell of oil paint fills the theater.
The play is about Mark Rothko, an abstract expressionist known for his color field paintings in the 1950s. After its premiere in London in 2009, the play went to New York the next year, sweeping six Tony Awards.
Director Oh Kyung-taek brings keen artistic tension onstage, full of metaphors for life, art and passion for 100 minutes. Veteran actor Kang Shin-il portrays the fastidious painter, while Kang Pil-suk plays his assistant, Ken.
Instead of following the chronicle of Rothko, the two-actor play focuses on a significant yet mysterious episode of Rothko — the Seagram murals.
In 1958, the painter was commissioned to provide paintings for the Four Seasons, a luxury restaurant in the new Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Rothko painted some 40 color field works, but after visiting the restaurant and being upset with its dining atmosphere, he refused to continue the contract and returned the deposit.
Logan exercises his imagination on this incident and brings in a fictional assistant, Ken, to take the role of challenging the thoughts of Rothko as an artist.
At first, Ken just mixes the paints, makes the frames and paints the canvases. He becomes timid at Rothko’s continuous questions on art, just like the audience under the flood of unfamiliar art terms and names of artists.
As Ken grows accustomed to his chores and the highly self-conscious Rothko, he starts asking the painter questions about his life, and something of a father-son relationship develops.
“The child must banish the father. Respect him, but kill him,” Rothko says in the play, referring to the Abstract Expressionists driving out the Cubists. But what he does not understand is how Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon images are considered art.
Ken hits back at Rothko’s egotism, questioning the commercial value of the Seagram murals. Their argument awakens Rothko, who resists the vested rights, but does not realize that he already is the “older generation” and about to be destroyed by Pop Art. He finally calls to cancel the contract for the Seagram murals.
“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend. One day the black will swallow the red,” Rothko says in the play.
The two Kangs fiercely argue throughout the 100-minute play, portraying the endless agony of artists and eternal cycles of generations.
When the two color an empty canvas in a strong, dark red onstage, the audience might recollect Rothko’s question to Ken: “What do you see?”
The play runs through Sunday. Tickets cost 44,000 won. For more information, visit www.iseensee.com or call (02) 577-1987.